Animal, Vegetal, and Mechanical Perils of Fieldwork

Dan Scantlebury recently recently posted a pair of success stories [1] [2] from the field.  This post focuses on a darker side, the perils of field work.  I’ve highlighted three stories below, one animal, one vegetal and one mechanical.

Mechanical Perils
No trip to the Dominican Republic is complete without transportation issues; we generally lose about a day every two weeks to dealing with vehicles.  In our last few trips we discovered in the middle of a river that our supposedly 4WD truck was in fact FWD, had a Dominican gomero refuse to fix a flat because the tire was too worn (remarkable because nobody has lower standards for what qualifies as a functional tire than a gomero), and realized our rental truck had one tire that was significantly smaller than the other three only after driving from Santo Domingo to Barahona.  Pictured above is my “favorite” vehicular mishap.

After spending a night searching for crown giants followed by a few hours of sleep in the truck, Miguel Landestoy, Dan Scantlebury and I starting driving back to Baní just before sunrise.  About 3km down the road, we heard a grinding sound from under the car.  We had run over a few dozen meters of thick wire sitting in the middle of the road.  The wire had wound itself inextricably around the rear axle.  After a few attempts unwrapping the wire, Dan and I resigned ourselves to crawling through the dried donkey dung under the truck and spent the next hour using tiny leatherman pliers to clip strands of wire until we were free.

Julienne's wasp wound.

Animal Perils
In terms of field sites, the West Indies Greater Antilles are home to relatively benign non-human vertebrates; there are no large predators or venomous reptiles and native mammals tend to be rare of entirely absent.  This lack of vertebrates leaves invertebrates as our main pests.  Of the invertebrates, Polistes wasps are the group that pesters us most frequently.  These paper wasps aggressively defend their well camouflaged nests against any hapless individuals who accidentally bump them.  In many cases, we’ll suffer multiple stings before we even realize what’s happening.  The picture below is of Julienne’s atypical reaction to one sting.

Vegetal Perils
A variety of plant perils exist in the West Indies, most are skin irritants.  We most comonly stumble into Prigimosa (Urtica spp.) and Poisonwood (Metopium toxiferum).  In some areas, Poisonwood is really abundant. The leaves (even dead ones on the ground) contain the irritant urushiol, which can cause a nasty rash.  A few years ago, a not-to-be-named PI experienced a month long, full body rash, resulting from an entire day spent “swimming” through a forest floor of poisonwood leaves searching for the world’s smallest amniote, Sphaerodactylus ariasae. One might say that’s what he gets for looking for non-anole lizards in the West Indies, but that would just be adding insult to itchy injury.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Follow me at

Anthony J Geneva

I am an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Camden. I use a variety of evolutionary genetic approaches to ask questions about gene flow, adaptation and speciation.

Follow me at

Latest posts by Anthony J Geneva (see all)

• John David Curlis - March 1, 2022
• Joe Macedonia - January 31, 2022
• Lindsey Swierk - January 27, 2022